


abandoned places

by quill_and_parchment



Series: A Sense of Adventure [6]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: "magical apocalypse" is not a tag but i wish it were, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bird/Human Hybrids, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, F/M, Human/Monster Romance, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Julian Devorak Route - Reversed Ending, Sad with a Happy Ending, Self-Esteem Issues, how do I even tag this one, it's a mess, the bird man deserves happiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:20:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25136074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quill_and_parchment/pseuds/quill_and_parchment
Summary: What if Esme got Julian's reversed ending? (She doesn't, but what if?)
Relationships: Apprentice/Julian Devorak, Julian Devorak/Original Female Character(s)
Series: A Sense of Adventure [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1820728
Kudos: 7





	abandoned places

**Author's Note:**

> I could not do this to the poor boy, it's so heartbreaking, but I just had the idea of MC going through the door and it's just a mess and there's a huge feathered shadow drinking itself into despair. like...fuck
> 
> "key-bellows" = accordion

The door stands alone, on the same island Esme remembers from her dream into the Hanged Man’s realm. A sandbar, surrounded by a ring of fog, a lone mangrove’s fingers surrounding the clearing inside. A lantern post, a red lantern, lighting a nondescript wooden door. It looks like there was once art on it - she can make out faint colors of peeling paint, long forgotten to time.

(What is time, now, anyway? The paint could be new, or very, very old.)

Next to the door, the upside down “L” of a signpost, a battered chunk of wood hanging from its hooks: “The Hanged Raven”.

 _Appropriate_ , Esme thinks. She is not even very surprised by the door - she doubts she could be surprised by anything anymore - but goes through the motions of walking around to its other side, examining the lock, rattling the doorknob (not locked, but she hesitates to open it just yet). As she comes around to the front again, Malak perches atop the post and pecks at the sign, sending it swinging. It creaks in the still air.

Scout is sitting on the sandbar, eating something from out of her pack. “Scout...is this it?” Esme hears her voice come out as a whisper, confidence swallowed by a sudden swell of hope and disbelief.

There’s a tension in the air, nothing else to be said. The little dog nods, almost sadly, and Malak echoes it with a shrill caw.

Esme reaches for the doorknob, letting the hope engulf her, and turns it.

Inside is a tavern.

The sight stirs a half-memory, as if this place - whatever it was, or is - is familiar to her. The mangroves from outside stretch their fingers inside, like two distinct environments have been merged together. Same old chairs and tables, but a couple of them are piled with empty tankards. A few are on their side, like they’ve been pushed over by someone, or something. The bar is in disrepair, deep gouges in the surface, bottles behind it tipped over, spilled, or broken. The whole place is gloomy and grim, the lanterns burning with flickering red light.

 _The Devil’s bar_ , she thinks, and knows that’s not an exaggeration. It _is_ the Devil’s bar, made for one occupant...but where is Julian?

The door’s on the wrong side, she realizes. It should be at the opposite end, where the wall of exotic bottles is no longer. Instead, the wall is taken up by four large, imposing mirrors, broken in a thousand places, covering the shelf and extending halfway down the tavern. She stares at her splintered reflection in them for a moment - mud smudged on her cheek, clothes plucked at by the mangrove roots, hair undone - and then moves forward. After all, there’s nowhere else to go.

Broken glass shifts and tinkles under her feet. Her foot bumps a tankard, knocked over, drink spilling out of it. An abandoned key-bellows plays itself in a corner, red light glinting off its press buttons; the notes that spill out of it are discordant, don’t quite fit together but make some sort of haunting melody nonetheless. She casts her gaze about for anyone else, and her eyes catch on...something. _Bird person?_ (She’s heard of bird people, but never seen one.) 

They’re slumped over at a table, bristling with feathers black as the abyss. A pair of wings droop against the back of the booth. She can’t see their face - it’s downcast, and a pile of empty tankards rises in front of them.

Esme approaches the feathered figure cautiously. A spectral hand lifts a bottle, fills a tankard, and they seize it and drink, not even appearing to pause for thought. She steps on a particularly big chunk of glass, and it scrunches against the others and breaks.

They look up at her, and her heart drops like a stone. For Julian made a deal with the Devil to save her, and now here he is in this tavern, turning into a feathered demon and trying to drink his troubles away. (His face is mostly unmarred by feathers, or she would not recognize him at all; his grey eyes shine like silver coins at night.)

“Welcome, stranger! Come on in, pull up a chair, have a drink!” He brushes some of the pile away from him, to clear a space on the table, but they jostle up against each other and fall on the floor. _How did I miss that it was him?_

“Julian?”

“Hmmm?” He smiles, cocks his head to the side a tad. “Haven’t heard that name in a while.” The feathers on his head stand on end slightly, and Esme finds that she can read his reactions like any ordinary animal. He is friendly, but cautious, guarded.

She steps toward him a little more, and the friendliness drops off his face - she can see it go. _Why are you afraid of me?_

There is a long, horrible silence. Then, “Ah, I see. Another illusion,” and Julian slumps back in his chair, wings draping behind him like a mockery of the overcoat he once wore. Her heart drops further, if it’s even possible.

“You think I’m an illusion?” Esme says softly, her voice betraying the hurt.

A bitter grin splits Julian’s face. “Oh, bravo! Excellent impression! You’re getting more convincing. The first few tries…” He heaves a sigh. “The less said about those, the better.”

Esme reaches forward, pulls out the chair opposite this new Julian, sits. She moves gently, carefully, like she’s trying not to spook a stray cat or dog. Julian takes another gulp out of his tankard. “But don’t worry! You sound just like the _real_ Esmeralda. Except for the part where I’ll never hear her voice again.”

He sounds horribly blase, as he gazes into what remains in the tankard and then drains it in one go. Esme stares as he slams it down on the table, only for the spectral hand to tip the bottle and fill it again. “But hey, everyone’s welcome here! Even illusions conjured by the Devil.” He offers her the tankard with an easy smile. “Sure you don’t want a drink? It’s on the house.”

In one of the secret gardens, blue twinkle of the starstrand in the vines overhead, and the same look on his face - expectant, a little daring, a little mischievous: this memory comes to her as her eyes flick from the tankard to his face (framed in feathers now, but the same look). She could use a drink, thirsty and tired from her journey, but this delicate reunion is not the time for alcohol.

“No thanks.”

Julian shrugs, and the feathers rustle and settle flat along his shoulders and upper arms. “More for me.” He slides the tankard back towards him, cups it in his hands - scaled and taloned - with practiced ease.

“So the Devil’s been sending you illusions of me?” _Just to confirm, mind you._

“Yes? Didn’t he tell you that when he made you?” Julian sighs, seems to deflate. “Well, when you leave, tell him he’s just wasting his time. I’m...I’m not…” He leans back, drinks from the tankard, and sounds defeated. “I’m not going to try to fight him again. He doesn’t have to worry about me anymore.”

Esme longs to reach across the table, longs to touch him, hold his face in her hands, reassure him, but her hands do nothing but rise from the table slightly and then drop again. Her lips twitch, tongue swelled with things she could say. _Oh, Ilya, what’s happened to you?_

“How - how long have you been here?” A foolish question - what is time, now, anyway? - but one she feels she has to ask.

“Eh? I haven’t been keeping track. It’s like trying to remember how many drinks I’ve had,” he adds, with a crooked grin. “Pointless.” He gestures around at the piles of empty tankards. “Every...however many, I lose count, and then I have to start all over.”

Esme sighs and settles in her seat. Julian is still watching her the same way a small bird in a cage might watch a cat, feathers slowly beginning to stand on end around his neck and shoulders. She reaches for his hands; the feathers fluff up in a panic, but she takes them anyway alongside a deep breath.

“Ilya,” she begins, “Do you remember that night on the aqueduct?”

“Don’t be silly. Of course I remember.” He tries to pull his hands away, but she grips them tighter. His talons bite into her fingers a bit, sharp little pinpricks.

“But the Devil doesn’t.”

Julian pauses, licks his lips. “What are you getting at?”

“It was just the two of us that night.” A wistful smile touches Esme’s lips, and her gaze softens into the distance. “I found red poison in the water coming from the palace foundation. It went all the way to the South End aqueduct.” If she closes her eyes, she can almost see the memory.

(Was there more? Following the water, but before that...someone else? She can’t remember.)

“And to you.”

Julian is trembling all over, and struggles to sit upright, as though he hasn’t moved from this slouch in this booth in a long time. The feathers on his shoulders, arms, and chest are shaking like leaves in a wind. Esme senses she’s getting through his martyred haze, and keeps going. 

“You had your old doctor’s mask. You said nobody needed a plague doctor if there was no plague. You threw it to the eels in the water. The last piece - “

“ - Of a past I can’t reclaim.” Julian’s eyes are wide and earnest. “You...you…” He swallows thickly, the feathers on his throat bobbing. “It’s you, it’s really you, _Esmeralda_ \- “ His breath comes out in a rush; he pulls her out of her seat and around to him, a slightly awkward hug. His hands are restless - they run through her hair, clutch her shoulders, run down her arms, mindful of his talons. “You’re here, you’re alive, you’re _real_ , I can’t believe it.” 

The wonder in his voice! Esme grins, the first time since her journey started or even before, to hear that again. “You should.”

Then he stops and swallows a thick, choked, despairing sound, feathers puffing up all over. Esme reaches for him, but he leans away from the embrace. “What is it, what happened?”

“You must be disappointed. You must have traveled so far, seen so much, and after all that, you find this, this…” He gestures down at himself, words failing, and Esme sees what he’s getting at. 

“Ilya, what are you talking about? That’s ridiculous.”

Julian makes a noise somewhere between a snort and a scoff. “The Julian you loved is gone.”

“No, he’s not. You’re right here.” 

And then he laughs, horrible and hollow, filled with derision and self-hatred, and stands. Long limbs unfold and stretch, joints cracking with disuse; feathers jostle against each other and settle begrudgingly into new positions. Talons on his feet arch out to claw the floor - _the gouges, on the bar._ Wings rise a little demonstratively, then settle, stretching. The red lantern light glints off the tankards, makes shadows of the mangrove roots, and shines on Julian’s feathers as he puts himself on display.

“Is he, Esme? Don’t be a fool.” 

( _Don’t be a Fool, ha-ha_ , she thinks, but it’s a bad time for joking.)

Most of the candles extinguish themselves in a dramatic gasp. The few that remain cast jagged, threatening shadows over him...but she has never been scared by danger, and she’s not scared now, even as Julian looms over her.

_If you think I’m scared of you, you don’t know me at all._

“Do you know how long it’s been? How long I suffered, alone in the dark? Not knowing what was real? _Who_ was real?” His voice gradually roughens into a grim, raspy snarl. “Do you know how much it hurt to forget you, to forget everyone? I clung to everything I could remember, and still I didn’t hold on hard enough.”

His skin, paled further in the lantern light, suddenly darkens in freckle-like spots along his cheekbone. _Feathers,_ Esme realizes, _this is how the feathers come in._ “And when I couldn’t take it any more, I tried to fight the Devil myself.”

A worry gnaws in her gut. Not for her own safety, but his.

Julian turns away and starts pacing, running scaled fingers through the feathers on his head and sending them askew. The talons on his feet click and dig into the floor with every pivot. “I fought and I lost, and I fought and I lost, again and again and _again_.” A small, ragged feather pushes through his skin like sprouts in spring soil, and Julian tears it out on reflex, hissing.

“Ilya - “

“Every time, I lost a little piece of myself.” He whirls towards her again. “Do you know how many pieces of yourself you can lose before you aren’t _you_ anymore?” And then he stares not at her but through her, and her heart shatters to see the look on his face. “Do you know what it’s like to look in a mirror and not know who’s looking back?”

Esme aches to help him, hold him, soothe him, but doesn’t know how to begin.

A clump of feathers burst through his skin, high on his cheekbone. Julian’s face twists, an expression she’s never seen. “And it was all for nothing.” The candles begin to light themselves again as Julian’s feathers lie flat and he collapses back into his chair. “When I signed my soul to the Devil, I lost everything.”

“Not everything.”

There is another long, horrible silence, broken by the puff of a defeated sigh.

“You don’t have to stay, you know. Your Julian is long dead. There’s nothing for you here.” Esme sits, determined, and takes his face in her hands, strokes the satiny soft feathers along his jawline.

“Yes, there is.”

He jerks his face away from her fingers, expression set in disgust. “Be honest. Do you still think you love me, even now?”

Esme’s heart swells, beats hard, because _yes, I do._ “Even now.” 

Of course it’s hard for her, coming so far and seeing and hearing him like this, but underneath all his self-hatred, he’s the same Julian, she knows it in her bones. There’s just...new things to get used to, that’s all. Like the feathers her fingers meet again on his face, when Julian turns it to her, startled. “I love you for who you are, not what you look like. And despite this, despite everything…” A little laugh escapes her. “You’re still you. That’s all that matters.”

“But I’m not the same, I’m not - “ She gets up from her seat then and moves to sit beside him, kisses him. He slowly relaxes, wrapping his arms around her and covering the two of them in wings like his old overcoat. His touch is so careful, and Esme knows she is safe here, that he is clinging to her like a lifeline and he will never let her go again.

“Please, Julian,” she murmurs into the feathers, as he holds her close, “Let me help you, set you free. You need to leave this place.” She can feel chains wrapped around him, his deals with the Devil, but she is too clever by half to offer to break them. _They’re for my ‘protection’. I don’t need extra danger, it’s already bad enough out there._ She cannot change what he’s become, but getting out of this tavern would perhaps do his mind some good.

“Maybe,” and it’s as much of a victory as she’s had since she got here. “The only good thing about being a monster is that all the other monsters are scared of me. And I’m finally strong enough to keep you safe. But if we leave, there’s no guarantee I can fight well enough.” He chews his lip, hesitates...and then bows his head, feathers tickling her face, to murmur in her ear.

“Stay here, with me.”

She furrows her brow. There were others, weren’t there? Before here? She remembers Scout, and Malak, but there were _people_ , too. Has she really been traveling so long she’s forgotten? _Asra_ , she thinks, but can’t remember a person to go with it. A dwarvish woman, stout and tough, wrapped in a shawl...but no name. Scraps are all that’s left. She does know one thing, that she wants to be here, with Julian.

“That’s all I ever wanted.”

Julian pulls his face out of her neck, where he’d been nuzzling it. “You will? You’ll stay?” She kisses his forehead, and he leans into the gentle touch.

“Of course. I won’t ever leave you.”

Julian’s smile reaches all the way up to his eyes, engulfs his face. “Esmeralda. Thank you.” Within his wings, he reaches for her hand and brings it to his lips, reverent. “I promise, I won’t ever leave you, either.”

Esme brings her hand to his cheek as he kisses the corner of her mouth, her nose, her forehead, her cheek. His whole face is loving.

 _You haven’t changed a bit._ She leans forward and hugs him tight, feeling the deep chuckle in his chest and the gentle touch of a kiss on the top of her head. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too.” They breathe together for a few moments, and then Julian makes a noise of surprise, unfolding one wing to reach for a fresh tankard on the table. “Look, it’s your favorite. Refills are on the house,” and he winks, flashing that dashing grin that is so distinctly him. 

Esme takes the tankard so he can reach for a second, filled by the spectral hand. “A toast. To our reunion, my love.” And he holds the tankard close to hers, gazes into her eyes. “May we never be parted again.”

Outside the Hanged Raven, the maelstrom carries on. ( _Was that a howl? Must be the wind._ ) Inside, Esme sits in Julian’s lap and snuggles against him, his new wings folded around her like a cozy blanket, and taps her tankard to his. Safe, in here, together.

They kiss, and drink.


End file.
